Determining the expected hydrocarbon recovery from a shale hydrocarbon prospect is an important role in determining the desirability of completing a well for exploiting the prospect. Various methods have been developed to predict the potential production performance of a hydrocarbon prospect. Generally, it is desired to make this determination in the most cost effective, efficient fashion with a minimum of delay. These factors become especially significant where an operator has a need to simultaneously evaluate dozens or even hundreds of hydrocarbon prospects.
Examples of conventional methods for determining expected hydrocarbon production potential for hydrocarbon prospects include, for example, seismic surveys, well logging techniques, and core sampling. Unfortunately, each of the conventional methods for evaluating expected hydrocarbon recovery from a prospect suffers from one or more significant disadvantages.
Although seismic surveys can reveal a great deal of geological information about a surveyed zone, seismic surveys are highly limited in their ability to estimate hydrocarbon recovery potential, because seismic surveys fail to yield the detailed type of data required for accurate well performance predictions. In addition to this failure of providing accurate estimations of hydrocarbon recovery potential, seismic surveys are costly to perform and require significant resources.
Various well logging tools can also provide a myriad of downhole information related to a prospect, including significant geological information relating to a particular well. Nevertheless, well logging devices traditionally fail to provide adequate data for efficiently estimating a prospect's hydrocarbon production potential. Moreover, logging a well is both costly and time intensive.
Of the conventional methods, core sampling can provide the most detailed information about a prospect's hydrocarbon production potential. Again, however, this conventional method suffers from both high cost and significant time delays. Not only does this method require drilling and extracting a core sample, which is resource and time intensive, this method also requires onerous lab tests to be performed to analyze the core samples.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for improved methods and devices for quickly and inexpensively evaluating hydrocarbon prospects that address one or more disadvantages of the prior art.